I will be out of the office until January 4th. If your query is urgent please contact Neil McLeod or anyone on the trading desk.

Best regards,

Elisabeth Bennet

She switched on the Out of Office reply, closed Outlook, then re-opened it and started typing again:

Off to France tomorrow: is there something I can send you from across the sea, from the place that I'll be landing?

This time she left Outlook running while she closed the dozens of other windows still open across her screens, then stood up and started putting her coat on, then her gloves and woolly hat.

'You off then?' Neil asked.

'Yeah, almost.'

She sat back down and took a glove off. Still no reply. She closed Outlook with a sigh. Then she reopened it one more time and there it was, Tom's reply, picking up Bob Dylan right where she'd left him:

No there's nothing you can send me, my own true love, there is nothing I am wishing to be owning. Just carry yourself back to me unspoilt, from across that lonesome ocean.

It wasn't an ocean it was only the English Channel but oh God, she couldn't wait.

'Have a good one,' she heard as she stepped into the atrium. She turned back, Will and Neil were looking at her.

'Oh yes, sorry! You guys too, have a lovely Christmas!' she smiled, and walked off.

xxx

Since Ben and Mac had already headed back to the provinces, Elisabeth had invited Charlotte around on her last night in London. She figured her new lifestyle would probably be a culture shock for her friend, so the timing was ideal: start by introducing just the flat; save the flatmates for later. She got home and baked, hoping to soften Charlotte up by using extra butter and sugar. She even tidied up a bit while the cake was in the oven.

Despite these efforts Charlotte's face did freeze when she entered the lounge -probably the first person to do so wearing stilettos and a camel coat since Ben and Mac had moved in. Charlotte made no comment though, even as she gingerly sat down on the edge of the sofa, only to be swallowed by its collapsed seat. Elisabeth hastened to produce a cup of creamy earl grey and a slice of chocolate cake while Charlotte righted herself up:

'Oh my god, zhish ish good!' Charlotte said, eating her first mouthful.

'Thanks! The oven's actually really good. Do you want to come and see my room?'

'Later, let me enjoy this first!'

'Cool.'

'Which one of them did this?' Charlotte asked, waving her spoon at the fresco.

'Ben did. You get used to it after a while.'

Charlotte frowned down at her plate, which was already almost empty, and for a moment she ran a scarlet-nailed finger over her crumbs in atypical silence.

'You OK?' Elisabeth asked. 'Are you warm enough? Shall I turn the heating up?'

'So basically,' Charlotte repressed a guffaw before she went on, 'So basically you used to have this really nice flat, and you've given it to Mike so you could move into this complete dump!' she said, and let out one of her legendary peals of laughter. 'Oh Jesus, Elisabeth, now I can wait to meet the housemates! Really, I can!'

OK, so it was much better to see Charlotte laughing, than on best behaviour, and yet Elisabeth didn't feel ready to join in and laugh at Ben and Mac:

'Look it's easy to make fun, Charlie, but they're great, really.'

Charlotte ate up the last of her cake, looked around her and then almost laughed again but she stopped the moment she saw the wounded look on Elisabeth's face.

'I'm sorry, hon, I didn't mean it like that. But it's just, honestly, it's really hard to know what to say!'

'Oh I know, I had that too, at first– and you haven't seen my blue walls yet,' Elisabeth said pensively. Charlotte frowned.

'But it's fine, really,' she started again, 'We put music on and make pancakes and pasta and bacon sarnies and tarts and read News of the Screws and it all gets very homely.'

'I'm sure you're right, Elisabeth, I'm sure you're right,' said Charlotte, dabbing at her laughter-teared mascara. 'Still, your Tom must be quite something to make this place attractive. When's he back again? When do I get to meet him?'

'New Year... the guys are having a party, I'll come straight back here after the Y2K test and...'

'And then I bet I'll be the last of your priorities!'

'You're probably right,' Elisabeth smiled, a little coyly despite her friend's indulgent gaze. 'But I promise I'll set something up for you to meet him as soon as we've had time to catch up just the two of us.'

'Great!'

'But promise not to be polite about him either, OK? He does go with the flat, you understand?'

'I'll do my best. How big is his trust fund again?' Charlotte asked, miming with her hands what didn't look like the size of a trust fund.

'Oh, shush! Anyway, how about you? How about another slice of cake? You're not dieting for the wedding dress, are you?'

'Definitely not, pile it on!' Charlotte said, but then let out a deep sigh. 'Oh, honey, I need to...'

'Yes?'

'Are you sure Tom doesn't want to come to the wedding?'

'That's really kind of you, Charlie, but he won't know anyone. We hardly know each other, for that matter. No don't worry about it, it's probably a bit too early for that.'

'It's just that...' Charlotte took a bite, swallowed, sighed again.

'Go on?'

'It's just that Mike's asked to bring Rachel along and stupid Colin's gone and said yes,' Charlotte said, so nervous that she forgot her exclamation marks. She needn't have:

'Jeeze, naughty Colin!' Elisabeth laughed, 'It's not as though he's the groom or anything!'

'You don't mind?'

'I take it we're talking about little Rachel from Mike's office, right?'

Charlotte nodded, dumbstruck. But enough water had flown under the bridge now, and enough emails had passed between London and Tallinn, for Elisabeth not to wish anyone any harm, not even "little Rachel from Mike's office". Sure, she'd been pursuing Mike unashamedly for years. She'd even tried to snog him right in front of Elisabeth's very nose at their last office Christmas do – but so what?

'So she's finally got her grubby little hands on him, hey? Well good on her, hope they're happy?'

Charlotte's astonishment was beginning to melt into relief:

'I guess they must be, if he's asking to take her along. But look, I know you've been really cool about it but still, I feel really bad: you're going to be banished to some singles' table while she's sitting with us and...'

'We've talked about it before, Charlotte, with him as best man I was never going to sit at your table. He and Colin have known each other since they were eight, we've got to respect that. And it's a shame I won't sit with you but you know what, with hindsight that really is the worst thing about breaking up with him.'

'Really?'

'Really, Charlie, by a long way. But much though I love you I still wouldn't get back together with him, not even for a seat at your high table. Is that alright?'

They gave each other a side hug on the sofa: it was typical of Elisabeth and Charlotte that, at this point, each felt she was being selfish towards the other, and neither of them was ever going to agree that she wasn't in the wrong.

xxx

The rest of the evening passed away in a flash, which by contrast made the next few weeks feel agonisingly slow. As she made her way back to London in the long awaited New Year Elisabeth realised she had never been so pleased to come back from a holiday, let alone from one in France. Her last couple of trips away with Mike had been a little dull and occasionally tense, sure, but this was in a different league altogether. She'd been terribly awkward around Jane. The poor thing needed more help than ever while Dan and Sophie did everyone's heads in. They did not travel well, got up at five every single morning, were constantly nagging for their home comforts, wouldn't eat Mamie's amazing food, swore the Teletubbies were different than in London and just too boooooring when the stupid things didn't even speak in the first place, for god's sake.

Elisabeth did her best to help and give Jane some time off, but the twins exhausted and annoyed her in equal parts, especially with the weather too poor to get them outside much. Even their company, however, was better than the guilt of hiding from Jane what she knew about her MD promotion. She and Vincent assumed Elisabeth's anxiety was to do with Tom, and teased her mercilessly about his return. She didn't have the heart to disabuse them.

They left on Boxing day to spend time with the Bingleys in Kent, and then Elisabeth's exhaustion abated, making room for depression, renewed frustrated anger at Toad, and also for a rising anxiety at the idea of her next meeting with Tom, made worse by the unusually long silence between them.

Her spirits lifted as her ears popped when her Eurostar emerged from the tunnel, and the Kentish hills replaced the vast flat expanses of the Somme. The train was quiet, just her at a table of four, with a cup of surprisingly good coffee, the tragic death of Prince Andrei, and Napoleon's sacking of Moscow. This did not make for the most cheery start to the new Millennium, but she had to admit that so far she was getting on with Leo Tolstoy unexpectedly well. She reset her watch while she waited for the district line. She could hope to get to the office by 8:30, done by nine, back home for ten, ten thirty?

In the end it took less than half an hour to get to the office, and about five minutes to establish that, despite today's YYYYMMDD starting in a two, Elisabeth's old programs still performed their appointed task of a Bank Holiday morning, i.e. wrote a three-line log-file stating that no new data was available to update the research databases.

What took far longer was to log in and out of four layers of security screening to document the exercise. Elisabeth had been dancing at a New Year's Eve party in Paris until three o'clock in the morning, and the sleep deprivation was getting to her so that she almost lost her patience when she discovered at 8:35 that what stood between her and getting home was a lack of connection to any printer. She almost lost it again when the IT guy supposed to be "right on his way" to fix it took twenty minutes to make his way over, pizza slice in hand. And she lost it outright when she subsequently found out that the printer he'd connected her to was out of paper. In the end she managed to hand in twelve sheets of paperwork, duly signed-off, just after nine, and start at long last on her way home.

But Transport for London was not on her side either, and having decided she'd be quicker on the tube she had to wait for one for ages. All of 12 minutes, but they felt like as many lifetimes. By this point there was no way she could have focused on Napoleon's misdeeds. Prince Andrei's body lay washed in his coffin, with Natasha, Sonya, Princess Maria and poor old Count Rostov weeping him. Elisabeth felt very sorry for him, and for the rest of them too, but ten times did she read the opening of the next chapter:

'It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.'

and still it made no more sense to her than if she'd read it in the original. She marked the page with her Paris Metro ticket and gave up, fighting an urge to check the time yet again, and feeling her chest tighten as she approached Archway. Will he be in, will he be gone? What if he never showed up at all? And what if he did? How would she measure up to his memories of Sara this time?

She made her way down an eerily quiet Holloway Road until she reached her glossy blue front door. She could see a light in the front room. She took off her gloves. She'd put her keys at the ready in her left pocket.

She thought she recognised a couple of the bodies strewn around the lounge, studied them each in turn, but none of them belonged to Tom. He must have gone back home. Her anxiety abated, replaced by disappointment, and a sudden and brutal surge of exhaustion. Mac opened an eye, he'd not made it to his room but lay sprawled over the sofa with his mouth gaping, snoring away. She smiled and raised a finger to her lips, shushing him back to sleep, picked her bag up again and went off to her room.

She opened her bedroom door, put her hand to her mouth and stopped breathing. She'd found him! She had found him! Tom was here! Right here in her bed, sleeping! Sleeping beautiful and happy, his shock of black hair grown and almost covering his eyes as he lay on his side, the duvet going up and down with his breathing. Even as she watched him from the doorframe she could almost feel his embrace again. Yes, he was right here in her very own bed, with his long body curled in and holding close that of a blondish girl, whose soft hair was covering her face, her chest rising and falling together with his.

xxx

Someone's hand was on Elisabeth's shoulder: she gasped for air. Mac pulled Elisabeth back out of the room, just as the blond head started to stir. He closed the bedroom door carefully and marched Elisabeth back to the lounge. She heard noises coming from her room as Mac went to stand by the kettle, only taking his eyes off her for a second to switch it on.

'I'm sorry,' he started again in a strained, high pitched sotto voce, then cleared his throat. 'We meant to catch you before I… I'm sorry, I must have fallen asleep.'

'Is that … Sara?' Elisabeth heard herself say in a small voice. She had one hand to her mouth and with the other she was pointing across several walls to her bed. She was too shocked and tired to feel properly angry, and Mac didn't know what to make of her detachment. He nodded, then looked away and set about making her the strongest instant coffee she'd ever drink, the kind of coffee that only people who don't drink coffee can make.

'OK,' she whispered, and went to the sink to add cold water in. She took a couple of sips, Mac still looking at her.

'Elisabeth,' he said, leaning closer to her and keeping his voice down as some of the bodies in the room were beginning to stir, 'your brother called, said you weren't picking up your mobile. Can you call him back?'

Elisabeth took a step back: Mac's morning breath was nothing to write home about. She took her mobile out of her back pocket. Three missed calls while she'd been on the tube, she should definitely have bused it.

'OK,' she whispered politely, 'I'll just finish this lovely coffee and call him.'

Mac stayed rooted to the ground in front of her.

'I'm fine,' she nodded, raising her mug, 'why don't you go back up to your room for a proper sleep? I'm sorry I kept you up.'

'No no, call him from my room,' Mac whispered with a nod at the sleeping bodies in the lounge, and cleared his throat again: 'but you'd better do it now,' he said, treating her to another blast of his hung-over breath. She refrained from swaying back, and just stared at him, her brain still in shock, her face frozen in an expression of startled politeness.

''said it was urgent, sounded like it too, you'd better go,' he continued, pointing up in the direction of his room.

'I'm sorry,' he said again.

'Stop saying that!' she snapped, then remembered none of this was his fault. 'I'm sorry, Mac, thanks for waiting up,' she said, back to a detached whisper.

He started rubbing his eyes and she went up to call Vincent. There was a feral smell up in Mac's room, so she went to the window and opened it, and let the cold morning air stun what was left of her senses. Her brain still in tailspin, Elisabeth forgot that Vincent and Jane always spent New Year's Eve at some posh hotel near Jane's parents, and she dialled their home number. She'd just realised her mistake after about 8 rings and was about to hang up, when her brother picked up:

'Aaaaaa-llo!'

'Hé, mais ! Qu'est-ce que vous foutez a Londres?'

'Elisabeth, finally, thank god, didn't you get my voicemail? How soon can you get here?'

'What? Why? What's wrong?'

'Jane: she's at the Royal Free. Au pair's still off, I had to drop her and get back here with the twins.'

'Oh no! No no no no no no NOOOOOO!'

By the last one she was yelling, and the tears which downstairs would not come now welled up in her chest, then down all over her face.

'Calm down, Elisabeth. Just take your bag, you haven't unpacked yet? Just get yourself over here so I can go back there and see her - please!'

He sounded wobbly, something so rare it jolted her all over again, and she realised she'd just have to get a hold of herself, for the moment at least.

'Sure.'

'Get in a cab.'

'Sure,' she said again, 'I'm on my way!'

She hung up on autopilot. By the time she got downstairs her face was a soppy sorry mess, her shoulders were heaving up and down, and she had no idea how to stop it. Images were chasing each other around her brain, of her weeping over Jane with Tom laughing on, and of her weeping over Tom with Jane laughing on. And why wouldn't she? How stupid could she have been?

'Mac?' she asked in between sobs.

'Yes?'

'OK,' she swallowed and made a conscious decision to try and breathe, 'I need you to do two things for me.'

'Of course.'

'First I need you to call me a cab a.s.a.p.'

'No prob.'

She repressed another urge to hyperventilate, blew her nose on a piece of kitchen towel, threw it away, and breathed out into her hands.

'I have to go over and baby-sit: Jane's not at all well.'

'Sorry.'

'And secondly,'

She let another sob go, breathed in, breathed out, took a sip of coffee. Still the flashbacks wouldn't go away, of that blond head pressed into Tom's chest. 'Secondly when they've gone,' she said pointing at the back wall of the lounge. She bit her lip until it hurt then breathed in and out again, her head tilted back so she wouldn't meet Mac's well-meaning eyes, 'when they've gone please go in and change the sheets.'

There, well done! She bit her lip again and swallowed the next sob, which twisted angrily on its way back down.

'I don't care to see those ever again,' she added, shaking her head, then gasped for air again, 'There's clean ones on the shelf in the wardrobe!'

Her voice was rising uncontrollably as the next sob rose up. She grabbed a fresh square of kitchen towel and wiped some more fat tears off her cheeks. Mac took another look at her and went up to his room to call her a cab. She wanted to blub so bad she had to wrap her hands around her midriff each time she forced a sob back down, and then gasp for air again with the misplaced eagerness of a landed fish. The flashbacks were pretty much constant now but she could not let herself cry any longer: within twenty minutes she'd have to keep it together for Vincent and the kids, so she'd better get used to this.

She splashed her face with cold water from the kitchen tap and went outside to wait for the cab, still holding on to her ribs.

xxx

'Elisabeth, great, come in!' said Vincent at the door. His face had a look of surprise, so she checked herself before realising he must simply be as stunned as she was.

'OK great!' he said again, 'You're here, uh… I'll go.' he said, all the while rooted to the floor like some monumental idiot. The hall was the usual mess and the twins could be heard in the playroom.

'Tell me what happened, I don't even know,' Elisabeth said, tearing her mind away from one excruciating subject and onto another. But Vincent did not speak.

'Is the baby…?'

'We don't know,' he shook his head.

'What happened?'

'I don't know, she complained of pains during the dance, even though we were just sitting there and not actually dancing. Then I guess she went to the loo and next thing I know she's shaking my arm and saying that there's blood. So we called the Royal Free and they said to come straight over. Offered to call an ambulance but we didn't want to spook the kids, so we just packed up and drove there. I didn't know whether to drive as fast as I could to just get her to the hospital quick, or slowly for the baby. And there was blood, Elisabeth. It's still there on the passenger seat, they managed to stop it somehow after we got there, but it was hell, I mean dragging Sophie and Dan half asleep around the hospital... we just couldn't stay. Thank god you're here now so I can go back.'

'You don't know anything?'

'They were doing more checks when I left, but we're... She's only 21 weeks, Elisabeth, I mean the twins were early but this is something else.'

'21 is too early.'

Elisabeth recalled something about 24 being a threshold. Maybe Jane herself had told her. But even then it wouldn't be pretty… Three weeks.

'OK,' she said. Witnessing her brother's disarray spurred her into action-mode, just as her own panic had done to Mac minutes before. 'Bro, you need to put some shoes on and go. Now. I'll call you a cab. Shit, you should have gone in mine!'

And with the picture of Tom and Sara's heads at the back of her mind now joined by that of Jane bathed in blood, she went to the kitchen and called one of the numbers on the fridge.

'Ten minutes,' she shouted to Vincent, who still stood rooted in the corridor. 'Did she ask you to bring anything?'

'I don't know.'

Elisabeth ran around the house for the next ten minutes gathering things she thought Jane might need or like, and gradually becoming more aware of how much her head was hurting.

'Off you go,' she said when the doorbell rang. 'Break a leg, and call me, OK?'

'Right.'

Elisabeth closed the door behind him, hoping against hope that he would manage to shape up a bit before getting there. Her own case was hopeless, a waking nightmare. Every few minutes she would revolt against the pictures flashing around her head: the small part of her mind, which still believed itself to be in control, demanded that she wake up. It fought heroically for her to wake up and escape, but then her eyes would fall back onto her bag in the hall, onto the twins, onto countless hateful markers of the reality of it all. They revealed to her the full hopelessness of her situation and it would take all her strength just to swallow another sob. She wondered how long she could carry on doing this before she stopped breathing altogether.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, with a text message from another world, from Charlotte:

Happy New Year!

Bet Ur far 2 busy w Tom

to rd this ;-)

xxoxx C.

The children were still in front of the television. Elisabeth retreated to the kitchen to call her back, and finally let herself blub away.

xxx

The opening days of Elisabeth's New Year were spent watching the twins, and very badly too. Under her regime they just sat and watched Dora the Explorer DVDs on a loop, shouting at the TV every time it was required, while feeding themselves dry Shreddies straight from one box each, to prevent fights. The hospital was being so accommodating, letting Vincent stay with Jane pretty much 24/7, that Elisabeth begun to worry that her latest little niece's chances - they'd found out it was a girl - were probably grim. But officially at least, the medical staff remained non-committal in their prognosis.

Elisabeth put her ill-procured downtime to good use, taking frequent breaks to weep her heart out in the downstairs toilet, all the while making sure that she could still hear the children howling "The map! The maaaaap!" in the playroom. She found at first that the physical act of crying was exhausting enough to be a respite from the ongoing mental torture. While her chest heaved, her eyes streamed and her tummy clenched she was, so to speak, in the moment: unable to focus on those images of Jane or Tom, which would otherwise swirl constantly in her mind. Inevitably though, the physical pain would in the end become as unbearable as the mental anguish it had replaced. Gasping for air, she would pick herself up and will her stomach to relax a little. Already Jane was back in her mind, dressed in a gory hospital gown and railing her for being so stupid as to let herself fall for Tom.

Elisabeth hadn't cried properly since Vincent had made her quit, at the age of six. Upon taking it up again she found that, for all that self-help nonsense floating around, there was in the long term nothing cathartic about it. Crying changed nothing, and it hurt. Therapy-wise, crying was as effective as it would have been to drive pins into her own nailbeds. So, just as almost a year earlier she'd given up smoking, she decided after two days to quit crying again, cold-turkey. And although it was impossible not to worry constantly about Jane, with Charlotte's encouragement Elisabeth at least started to get a little angrier with Tom, and a little less with herself.

By the time Jane's mum arrived to take over Elisabeth still hadn't managed to eat or sleep normally, but her eyes had been dry for nearly 24 hours. Mrs Bingley thought she looked terrible, but she was hardly looking bright eyed or chirpy herself. Vincent called just before Elisabeth left: things were stabilising, baby was still alive, but it looked like bed rest on the ward from here on for Jane.

Elisabeth was due back at work the next day so she went home to unpack, at last. The thought of going back to her room and her bed was almost too much to bear, and it was all she could do to walk in without her knees buckling under her. Once she got in though, to her surprise she laughed. She'd left some perfectly good sheets in the wardrobe but for some reason her flatmates had guilt-tripped themselves into buying her new ones. Shopping on the Holloway Road on the first of January had however yielded only the most horrid pink polyester duvet set, which against the walls' already disgusting baby blue was simply puke-inducing.

And they smelt of shop.

At least they didn't smell of Tom. She almost started crying all over again, but made a conscious effort to steady her breath and look at Charlotte's last text instead. One friend like Charlotte, she reminded herself, was worth so much more than any number of smooth talking, two-timing Toms. And since she would have to talk to Ben and Mac at some point she decided she might as well do it now, and walked back into the lounge.

'Was that all right?' Mac asked when she got in.

'It's great, thanks,' she lied, 'Where on earth did you find those sheets?'

'The Irish shop, only thing that was open.'

'Thanks.'

'Would you like a bacon sarnie?'

'Well, since I haven't eaten for a while now, and I'm going to reek of them anyhow.'

'Excellent! Ben?'

Just then she noticed him on the sofa, and plonked herself next to him.

' 'you all right?' he asked.

What did he think? Of course she wasn't all right, but since he clearly wasn't equipped emotionally for dealing with how she felt about his dear friend right now she spared him her real thoughts:

'Happy New Year, Ben. On the plus side it's a girl, and if Jane hangs in there she might just be able to survive.'

'Good!' they both said, far too eagerly.

'You're OK about Tom then?' Ben asked a while later, then immediately looked away. She wondered for a second how much of an effort it must have taken him to get personal in a non-ironic fashion. Possibly almost as much effort as it was taking her to keep it together.

'Well I wouldn't say that I'm OK but…' she thought what she'd been starting to think since she'd been bending Charlotte's ear instead of sobbing uncontrollably behind toilet doors, 'He always said he loved Sara, right? He never said anything else, and it's not as if we were married or anything, he's got every right to be with her if that's what he wants. But am I pissed off with him? Yes. A lot.'

They were silent, Mac turning back from his bacon-frying to check on her a couple of times. But she was off: talking to Charlotte was one thing, but Mac and especially Ben had borne witness to Tom's shameless flirting and she felt she needed their vindication before she could go back to the office tomorrow, and pretend to be fine about it.

'What really bothers me is how he's made me look like some complete idiot all this time. I was doing fine without him and if he was that into Sara he should have left me well alone!'

The guys turned to look at each other across the back of the sofa.

'I don't think it was like that,' Mac started.

'Oh really? What was it like then, exactly?'

'They're not…' Ben moved his hands around with distaste, struggling for words, '...together.'

Elisabeth frowned. Not together? They'd looked pretty together in her bed.

'She's still with her gallery owner, I think,' Ben added.

'Good for her! And I care because?'

But of course she cared. She cared very much that Sara should hurt and humiliate Tom a fraction as much as he'd hurt and humiliated her.

'Come on, Elisabeth,' Mac said, walking over to serve her sandwich, 'I really don't think he led you along.'

'Did too.'

'He didn't even know she was coming! We didn't, he'd just been going on and on about you. And then she just showed up about 4 o'clock or something. I mean, it was really late and we were all a bit pissed by then, to be honest.'

'Tom was definitely pissed,' Ben said, to his thumbs.

'No one was expecting her. Really, no one. Why she showed up…' Mac continued.

Elisabeth sighed, and bit into the sandwich. Objectively, it was lovely, but eating anything more than the odd Shreddie was still difficult: food and repressed sobs just did not mix well in her stomach. Mac had time to finish his entire plate before she even got halfway through hers.

OK, she was thinking, so perhaps it wasn't premeditated. Perhaps Tom just couldn't help it that with her things were fun and flirty and superficial, and ultimately so awkward in bed he had to leave before daylight, while with Sara he could just slip into love and sleep a peaceful sleep curled up all around her like that. What did he say? Sara couldn't be summed up in terms of hair and eyes and limbs, or something. Right, so this was what Sara could do, the quiet look of contentment on his face while he held her. It made perfect sense now.

'It's OK, guys,' she sighed. 'I mean I could never make him this happy.'

She got up and put her empty plate in the sink, then went for a shower, and took her unrelenting headache off to bed in her stiff, smelly new sheets.

Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved